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Operating Systems Software Businesses Apple

The Birth of the Apple Lisa 283

Posted by CmdrTaco from the helluva-contraction-you-got-here dept.
Ton writes "People think Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, but it's much more subtle than that. Braeburn has posted a story about the development and birth of the Apple Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical interface. More on this subject at Andy Hertzfeld's (one of the original developers of the Mac) site Folkore.org."
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The Birth of the Apple Lisa More

The Birth of the Apple Lisa

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  • For some reason I had always thought the Lisa had 3.5 inch floppy drives. Weird.

    • Re:Hunh... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The first Lisa had 5.25" twiggy disks, the second gen may be what you're thinking of.

      And what's with all these articles from the braeburn guys? How many comments do we need showing they don't bother researching ANY facts about the things they write about? It's really getting twee to see so much attention put on morons who can't get a few simple facts straight.

      Go google info about the Lisa. you'll find more correct info out there by looking for it yourself.
    • The Lisa 2 had 3.5" floppies.
      • I think the Lisa II was also called Macintosh XL. Maybe data compatibility between the Mac and the XL was reason for the switch to 3.5 " floppy disks?

        • Re:Hunh... (Score:3, Informative)

          by pauljlucas ( 529435 )
          The Macintosh XL came later. It was the Lisa 2 hardware with a change of video board to make the pixels square so Mac software would look right on the Lisa screen. (Lisas has rectangular pixels that were taller than wide.)

      • Re:Hunh... (Score:3, Informative)

        by cosmic_0x526179 ( 209008 )
        The Lisa 2 had 3.5" floppies.

        That is correct. What most people don't know is that the 128K Mac almost ended up with Twiggy drives as well. If anyone has a 128K (possibly even a 512K) original Macintosh, Pull the back cover off. You may have to remove the motherboard to see this (its been a few years, so I don't recall exactly). The metal frame that holds the front plastic bezel has punchouts in it for a 5.25" drive. So the decision to go with the 3.5" drive in the Mac was made fairly late in the design cyc

    • Well, YES, they did steal the idea.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Simonetta ( 207550 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @12:23PM (#13208412)
      Yes, Apple did steal the idea for a graphic user interface from the demo visit that Jobs and crew made to Xerox PARC. Jobs and crew were primed for a completely new user interface for a low-cost (here meaning less than $50000 US 1981 dollars) business computer. They came, they saw, they copied.

          Xerox hired great people who created a new computer environment. Xerox management saw it and realised that it could make them rich. Xerox slapped a $50,000 price on it, sat back, did nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.

          Apple hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Apple management saw Xerox's work and realised that it could make them rich. Apple copied it, slapped a $10,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.

            Atari hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Atari's 'management' saw Apples's work and realised that it could make them rich. Atari copied it, slapped a $1,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.

            Microsoft hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Microsoft management saw Atari's work and realised that it could make them rich. Microsoft copied it, slapped a $100 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it soar, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry Unix programmers to see it.

          The point? Stop your management monkeys from looking at the technology world as a means to get rich and more as way to build the framework and infrastructure that will allow wealth to be generated by new organizations and processes that are made possible by new technology. Then they will be able to make enough money to keep their pointy little heads happy.

          Stop being so fucking greedy. Greed is not good. In the long run, it doesn't work.
      • " Atari hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Atari's 'management' saw Apples's work and realised that it could make them rich. Atari copied it, slapped a $1,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it."

        What specifically was this? It sounds almost like the ST, but the facts do not match the ST situation. The ST was a copy of the Mac ("Jackintosh") and did not have it

        • Atari's ST came out in 1985-86 and it was a low-cost direct steal of the Apple Macintosh GUI. It sold at 1/10th the price of the Apple.
          Microsoft's Windows version 3 was a direct copy/steal of the Apple Macintosh GUI. It seperated the software from the hardware and was therefore able to sell for 1/10th the price of the Atari ST. Windows 3 users did need to upgrade to new Intel 386 -class machines in order to run Windows 3.

          Each company attempted to get rich by stealing the same
          • yeah, but who (as you claimed happened) stole from Atari?
          • Actually, 80386 support in Windows started with Windows/386 2.10 in 1988 but why mess up a mythology with something as messy as facts.

            Windows 3.0 users did NOT "need to upgrade" to intel 386 based machines (which were several years old by then - not NEW as you state) because Windows 3.0 in 1990 supported 3 modes.
            1. Real mode (which ran on just about anything x86 available)
            2. Standard mode (which required an 80286 or above processor)
            3. 386 Enhanced mode (which, obviously, needed a 386 to run) and took advantage of all those "Advanced CPU" features you claim weren't supported in Windows until five years and 3 versions later.
            Really, if you're going to make it up as you go along, let people know it's just fictional ranting.
      • Yes, Apple did steal the idea for a graphic user interface from the demo visit that Jobs and crew made to Xerox PARC.

        Interesting concept of steal: From TFA (which you no doubt read before offering your incisive wisdom):

        Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for t

        • "Is any one else tired of hearing this shit about how Apple ripped off Xerox?"

          Not as tired as we are about hearing how Microsoft stole everybody blind while everybody else was completely innocent and lovable and did no wrong.
      • More accurately, they licensed the idea of a GUI from Xerox. But they didn't use Xerox's GUI, they created their own, which was considerably different from the Xerox GUI. Indeed, many of the features that most impress people about the Apple GUI (and the Microsoft one,l for that matter) were originated at Apple.

  • stole the graphical interface? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jmcmunn ( 307798 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @10:44AM (#13207868)

    Like it hadn't occurred to hundreds of people by that point that a graphical interface was a good idea? I mean don't think for a second that the first time someone pulled off a GUI, there weren't a hundred other companies immediately having meetings on how to take advantage of the idea. I'm guessing Apple was the quickest to implement.
    • Like it hadn't occurred to hundreds of people by that point that a graphical interface was a good idea?

      Yeah, but could they do it with only two weeks and a $100 budget?

      What the hell, I've got karma to burn... [slashdot.org]
    • Fine, fine, fine. But if you are going to brush off Apples theft, don't bitch about Microsofts theft from Apple. World goes round.
    • At OOPSLA '87 (back in the pre-history days) we pretty much all were astounded that we had all been strongly influenced by a single article in Scientific American in the late '70s that showed off future trends in computing including the work at PARC. You never know what will be the thing that really sets off an industry. A fairly interesting group was there including Alan Kay (Smalltalk-72), Adele Goldberg (Smalltalk-80), Bjarne Stroustup (C++), Brad Cox (Objective C) - how much each of them inspired that article or was inspired by it is left to the reader.

    • Didn't want the graphical interface... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sithech ( 858269 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @12:58PM (#13208606)
      Actually, industry observers and commentators up until 1990 frequently said that the graphical interface was a bad idea. Check out the press from that time and you'll see arguments that GUI's are too slow, childish, disrespect the expertise of users, and reduce productivity because they take your hands off the keyboard.

      And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level. Try booting one up in Win 2.0 some time...

      BTW, a huge chunk of what we now consider standard interface stuff was invented for the Mac, such as the file interface.
      • And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level. Try booting one up in Win 2.0 some time...

        I bet Apple could have done it. After all, they implemented a full color GUI on the Apple IIgs, which had a 2.8 MHz 65816.
    • This was in summer of 1983. I'd been writing Apple and PC programs for years in 6502 and 8088 assembly. I couldn't believe the $10,000 price tag, which was so outlandish you'd never even think of recommending it to clients (a 20meg Corvus hard disk was $3,500 or so at that time, iirc).
      But the bitmapped GUI was unlike anything you'd ever imagined. It wasn't even obvious how to start working with the thing. No one else was talking about anything similar at that time, at least not for practical, widespread usa
      • But the bitmapped GUI was unlike anything you'd ever imagined. It wasn't even obvious how to start working with the thing. No one else was talking about anything similar at that time, at least not for practical, widespread usage. I think you're wrong about the hundred companies scrambling to implement it. It was one of those ideas whose brilliance took quite a while to become apparent to most people.

        I also saw it when it came out. It was instantly obvious to me that it was the wave of the future, and that e

  • It gets good here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pcmanjon ( 735165 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @10:44AM (#13207871)
    " was more powerful than most minicomputers of the day. The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders, and stopped giving tours. Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted, and gave Steve and a team of engineers from the Lisa project a tour of the technologies at PARC.

    Steve Jobs (who took only Bill Atkinson along on his first visit), who had a rather limited understanding of technology, was most impressed by the graphical interface he saw running on the Alto. The interface was nothing like today's desktop based interfaces, but was a huge jump forward from the command line interfaces used everywhere else. When the engineers returned they had a vision of what they wanted in the Lisa project. The Apple chairman was so impressed that he interrupted a demo given by Larry Tesler asking him why nothing was being done with the technology. For the second visit, Jobs brought along several members of the Lisa project, and was given a much more technical demonstration. The other engineers who went on the second visit, who were briefed by Jef Raskin before their visit, were equally impressed.

    The Apple engineers were not the only ones to be impressed by the visit, the researchers at Xerox, long discouraged by Xerox's inability to release a product based on the technology developed at PARC, were impressed by Apple's seeming willingness to implement advanced technologies in their products.

    The Lisa project changed dramatically. No longer was it to be a mere hardware upgrade to the Apple II line, the new focus of the Lisa project was software. The team wanted to implement all of the innovations they saw at PARC."

    It's not really stealing, but rather just "implimenting" someone elses innovations.
    • Not only that, but Apple paid a huge sum to Xerox (in the form of stock options), just to *look* at it, and get ideas.

      It's like paying Ford to take a look and test drive a new Mustang, and then turning around and building a Corvette. Same ideas, different implementations.

    • Re: It gets good here (Score:4, Informative)

      by phillymjs ( 234426 ) <slashdot.stango@org> on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:20AM (#13208062) Homepage Journal
      So you're asserting Apple stole Xerox's stuff, when right there in the text you quoted it says otherwise. Did you even read it? Allow me to repeat. Read just the bold parts:

      Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology.

      That looks like a pretty clear quid pro quo to me. Do you think the Xerox people who made this deal were idiots? Do you think they didn't know the probability the Apple people would take and build upon the things they saw at PARC-- things the Xerox suits had no plans to put into products of their own?

      I suggest you watch Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds"-- one of the people interviewed is Adele Goldberg, a former PARC staffer. In her interview, she explained that she made it clear to the Xerox suits what was likely to happen if the Apple people got their tour, and refused to give any demos to them unless they Xerox suits directly ordered her to do so. Which they did. The rest is history.

      ~Philly

      • Re: It gets good here (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ClosedSource ( 238333 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:30AM (#13208110)
        You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.

        Eventually Xerox sued Apple, but the case was thrown out for the same reason that Apple's case against MS was thrown out. The courts didn't buy the argument that a program's "look and feel" were covered by copyright.

        Apple never tried to argue in that case that their tour of Xerox entitled them to any rights, by the way.

        • Re: It gets good here (Score:4, Informative)

          by phillymjs ( 234426 ) <slashdot.stango@org> on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:54AM (#13208245) Homepage Journal
          You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.

          That's true, but no reasonable person would be surprised that the Apple people would be influenced by the stuff they saw at PARC. My theory is that (at the time) the Xerox suits saw no value in what was being developed, and thus saw no harm in letting Apple see it. If they thought it was valuable, they would never have let the Apple contingent in the building. Instead, they probably thought they were screwing Apple by getting virtually free money out of their investment, in exchange for letting Apple see worthless, unmarketable crap.

          Eventually Xerox sued Apple

          Well, sure, after realizing in horror that they gave away the keys to the kingdom. No matter how much money they made on their investment in Apple, it would have been dwarfed by what they could have made if they had fully exploited the GUI themselves.

          Apple never tried to argue in that case that their tour of Xerox entitled them to any rights, by the way.

          Well, that goes back to my first point. Nobody could reasonably expect the Apple people to not be influenced by what they saw. Short of erasing their memories after the tour a la "Men in Black," if you want to ensure they won't be influenced by the stuff, you don't let them see it.

          And though Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple, I can only assume there were no NDAs covering the visits, either-- those would have been a potent weapon in the lawsuit, had they existed.

          ~Philly
        • What rights could Xerox have given them if look and feel is not covered by copyright?
          • What rights could Xerox have given them if look and feel is not covered by copyright?

            Well, that's a trick question. Since Apple believed that Look-n-Feel was legally protected by copyright, it follows that they should have bought the imaginary rights from Xerox.

        • Re: It gets good here (Score:4, Informative)

          by blibbler ( 15793 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @12:06PM (#13208319)
          You can spin things however you want, but Apple's case against Microsoft wasn't thrown out because the court didn't acknowledge "look and feel", but rather because a contract between Apple and Microsoft essentially granted Microsoft rights to various aspects of the interface. http://home.earthlink.net/~mjohnsen/Technology/Law suits/appvsms.html [earthlink.net]
          Many people don't understand the concept of "look and feel" and focus purely on the appearance of the interface. If you read the article, you would have noticed the point that the Alto's interface was very difficult to use, whereas the Lisa team made usability the primary focus for their interface. While they might have looked similar (overlapping windows and desktop metaphor aside) they had a very different feel. By contrast, Microsoft took much of the "feel" from the Lisa and Macintosh ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bi bliography/93-12html/93-12.ps [umd.edu]

        • Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.

          At the time there was very little precedent for enforcing intellectual property laws against what we know as a gui and Xerox had no protectible rights to grant that Apple was interested in:

          • Trademarks - created and maintained by usage; not having a shipping product would have been problematic trying even if they had tried to trademark terms like "mouse".
          • Copyright - Original text, images, and media were used for the Lisa/Mac.
          • Patents - The two tours were superficial
        • You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.

          At the time they didn't really have any rights to grant. They owned the look and feel of their interface, but Apple's was quite different. And patent policy at the time held that software and user interface concepts could not be patented (otherwise, there would never have been Lotus or Excel, and we'd probably all be running some version of Visicalc).

    • The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders, and stopped giving tours. Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted, and gave Steve and a team of engineers from the Lisa project a tour of the tec

  • Not the first.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @10:48AM (#13207885)
    "the first commercial computer with a graphical interface"

    The Lisa was the first major one with a sophisticated non-text graphical interface for file access. However, it was not the first to use such an interface at all. Earlier offerings from Apple, Atari, Commodore, etc had many individual programs that had interactive graphic (non-text) interface and control. Probably would be better to say that it was the first commercial offering featuring the early version of today's GUI.

    • Re:Not the first.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by north.coaster ( 136450 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:06AM (#13207991) Homepage

      The Xerox Star was commercial product. It was marketed to Executives, not average folks. Cost was something like $10,000 (in 1981), if I recall correctly.

      It's sort of funny that people make such as big deal about the GUI, when in reality the laser printer was (and still is) equally important. Guess who invented the laser printer? Hint... it starts with a X...

      • " Hint... it starts with a X"

        Probably Xerox, one of the leading makers of xerox machines. I've had xerox machines from both Canon and Xerox :). They've done pretty good for a company that sounds like the name of Zaphod's brother.

        • Probably Xerox, one of the leading makers of xerox machines. I've had xerox machines from both Canon and Xerox :). They've done pretty good for a company that sounds like the name of Zaphod's brother.

          I think you meant photocopier.

          Are you the kind of person that calls tissue Kleenex or video game consoles Nintendo? The brand name penetration in American consumerism really deserves a good study one of these days.

          For the record I also love how Kraft Mac 'n Cheese is somehow the cheesiest even though it really
          • "Are you the kind of person that calls tissue Kleenex or video game consoles Nintendo?"

            Like everyone else, I call kleenex kleenex, no matter what the brand. Even if it is Kleenex brand Kleenex, with the capital K. Like everyone else, I know Nintendo is a latecomer to the videogame industry, and it is just one "videogame" among many offerings from many companies.

            Photocopying was commonly called xeroxing before the Xerox company started to throw fits about it. See this definition page [wordreference.com].

      • I don't see how a laser printer is "equally important". You could use an inkjet printer, a thermal printer, a dye-sub printer, a daisywheel printer, or a dot-matrix printer just as well, without much of a difference. Of course, someone would have eventually came up with the laser printer, given that it's basically a version of the copy machine.
      • I used a Xerox Star once. Cool machine. When the Lisa came out I thought it just a cheap Xerox with smaller monitor.
      • Yeh, I remember the Xerox Star at NCC in 1982, it came out just before the Lisa. The problem with both of them was that they were too expensive for the growing home computer market. Apple responded with the Mac, Xerox responded with a really good CP/M-80-based computer.

      • Re:Not the first.... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) *

        It's sort of funny that people make such as big deal about the GUI, when in reality the laser printer was (and still is) equally important. Guess who invented the laser printer? Hint... it starts with a X...

        But the company that made the laser printer into something people would buy started with an A. Xerox had their laser printers but offered little incentive for people to buy them. The Xerox Star came with one but the machine was priced far beyond what anyone would reasonably be expected to pay for a per

        • Re:Not the first.... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by MojoStan ( 776183 )
          But the company that made the laser printer into something people would buy started with an A.

          You misspelled "Adobe" (wink).

          From "Triumph of the Nerds":

          Despite the hype, by late 1984, the Mac's sales were disastrous...

          Until someone invented a way to print exactly what was on the screen gui would be, well a lot of hooey. Apple's problem was the dot matrix printer. It gave everything a type-writer quality. But salvation was at hand - and once again it owed a lot to Xerox Parc. One of Parc's former bra

      • According to here [digibarn.com], the Star was $16500 at first release. They were great machines for their time, but not really at their best unless connected to a network with file servers and printers - stand-alone support was minimal. I can attest to that from my time at Xerox AI Systems (1986-88) - our stand-alone customers had to make do with Epson dot-matrix printers that sort-of worked, and we sent them system image updates on huge stacks of 5 1/4" floppies whose reliability was questionable on a good day.

        Also, I know of two other windowing workstations that were commercially available in 1981:

        The PERQ [wikipedia.org]

        Lisp machines [andromeda.com] from LMI and Symbolics

        The Lisa was not the first commercial GUI machine, though it probably does hold the title for the first commercial machine under $10K.

  • You Can't Do That On Television (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BitwizeGHC ( 145393 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @10:58AM (#13207943) Homepage
    That's how I first heard of the Lisa -- through YCDTOTV locker jokes.

    Alasdair: "Oh, Christine!"
    Christine: "Yes, Alasdair?"
    Alasdair: "Did you know they made a computer called the Lisa?"
    Christine: "I hope it doesn't talk!"

    (note: Castmember Lisa Ruddy was portrayed as annoyingly, excessively talkative.)

  • The difference between Apple and Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)

    by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:02AM (#13207971)
    This article pretty much illustrates the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple tried really hard to come up with a great, user friendly GUI for the Lisa, and in the end sold it for close to $10K to try and quickly recoup costs. Microsoft instead goes and buys a crappy OS (the early DOS) for $80K or whatever it was, sells the crap out of it to IBM and becomes the dominant player. Now Microsoft can afford to sell its OS dirt cheap as it makes up the cost in volume and monopoly practices. Apple still continues to design a great OS and sell it along with hardware at a high premium. Pretty much nothing has changed in the philosophy.
    • So Microsoft took the good business approach and Apple paid the price for early adoption. Big deal.
    • Don't forget that Bill Gate's Mom served on the same boards and charities (Red Cross?) that an IBM VP served on. It's all about who you know.
    • Yes, this is characteristic, but its surely not the real and most important difference in terms of outcomes? The real difference is the business model. Apple's model was and is to only let you run the OS on their hardware. This ensured that when the market raced away, they could only supply a tiny fraction of it. MS's model was to sell to anyone to run it on anything. Lots of hardware suppliers then entered the market. The result was that there were no supply constraints at all. Put it another way:
    • Your forgetting that Apple was developing a computer and MS an OS. So Apple had the potential of making a lot more money on a unit sale then MS.

      You should also remember that it was IBM that set the hardware requirements for the PC. The original PC had an 8088 with 16K of memory. The original Mac had 68000 with 128K of memory.

      The fact is that DOS was a pretty good OS given the limitations of the hardware and the accelerated development schedule.
      • You should also remember that it was IBM that set the hardware requirements for the PC. The original PC had an 8088 with 16K of memory. The original Mac had 68000 with 128K of memory.

        I was curious as to this, because 16k does not seem like enough to even boot DOS 1.0 yet alone run anything. Seemed suspicious. Let's check out the wikipedia, which I realize is not the most acurate source sometimes, but I have a feeling their data on the original IBM PC is pretty good.

        The original PC had a version of Microsoft
        • Amazing! Only 16k onboard and the 64k would have made it around 80k or so. How did these things sell like hotcakes? I mean they weren't really any better than much else that was out at the time

          Originally the IBM PC was targetting the Apple II+, and shipped with similar specs and pricing. However, when it started getting adopted by businesses, it was usually loaded out with more memory and storage than the Apple systems. 64K was the maximum memory for an Apple II and the minimum for an IBM. (Oh, and nobody
    • The reason Apple did not dominate was because they could not, or would not, bring the cost of their hardware in line with the dos/windows world.

      Not only that, as the sole provider of the hardware they could not innovate fast enough or provide enough variety in configurations to keep up with the pace of the development or need in the PC world.

      Microsoft became so large because they rightly focused on only one side of the equation. They didn't have the risk of sitting on hardware. Old software can be discard

  • People think... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PsiPsiStar ( 95676 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:04AM (#13207984)
    The RIAA thinks that I stole music using Kazaa, but it's much more subtle than that...

  • I seem to remember modding mine so it wouldn't lose the time. Seem to remember they either didn't have a battery backed clock or it was faulty.
    • I have heard this from my father, who was an active PC user at the time. In fact, the clock chip, which he told me was no longer being manufactured by the time Lisa was released, was one of the reasons why the platform failed.

  • I call BS (Score:3, Funny)

    by Gilmoure ( 18428 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:18AM (#13208057) Journal
    Apple never paid Xerox or did some kind of stock deal or hired a bunch of their disgruntled engineers when Xerox was too dim-bulbed to take advantage of their work. Apple used stealth Morris-Dancer Monkey Ninjas, who snuck in and took pictures of screens. Apple then went and used high powered scanners to read the computer code behind the screen shots.
    • Where o where is the damning photo of Steve Jobs holding an imaginary phone and telling Woz how they won't succeed without ninjas and bears?
    • Apple then went and used high powered scanners to read the computer code behind the screen shots.

      Well there is probably some truth to that. Not actually reading the code. But If I need to copy the functionality of an other program I usually need to see the program in action. for example Apples Spotlight feature. Now according to Apple marketing it just somehow magically searches your hard drive in a split second. But when you actually get you hands on it you see that it is indexing the files which can ta
      • And if you look a little deeper into Apple's GUI development, you'll find out that's exactly what they did. 'Course, they didn't always get it 'right'. Even in this article, it's told how one engineer mis-remembered seeing windows layered on top of one another. Turns out that Xerox did not have such a feature but guys at Apple figured out how to do it. Cool!

        Still, Morris dancing ninja monkeys sounds cooler.

  • Stole (Score:5, Informative)

    by christurkel ( 520220 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @11:32AM (#13208114) Homepage Journal
    While Apple engineers were certainly inspired by PARC, to say they stole belittles the desktop innovations they did: Pull down menus, overlapping windows and a desktop trash bin.
    • "to say they stole belittles the desktop innovations they did: Pull down menus, overlapping windows and a desktop trash bin."

      ....the last of which, Apple did not get right by "mangling the metaphor": it makes no sense to use the trash can for ejecting media (without deleting files) AND for just deleting files.

      • ....the last of which, Apple did not get right by "mangling the metaphor": it makes no sense to use the trash can for ejecting media (without deleting files) AND for just deleting files.

        I won't argue that it's logical, but as a user I always felt it made sense in some way. Moving the disk to the trash was kind of like saying, "I'm done with this, let's put it away." There's a strange connection between throwing something in a virtual trash can, and then seeing a disk eject from a drive. It always seemed

        • What's really irksome to me is using a flash drive in Windows. The whole device removal process in Windows is way too complicated and annoying compared to OS X; most non-technical people I see just rip the drive out without unmounting it.

          Interesting. In OS X to you have to unmount by dragging to trash, in Ubuntu you do a right click and select unmount (or whatever they call it). Suse 9.1 you just "rip it out". Whoo-hoo, sounds like at least one environment gets it right!

          • In OS X to you have to unmount by dragging to trash,

            Not necessarily. The sidebar of all Finder windows contains icons for all the mounted devices. For removable media and network shares, there is a grey "eject" button to the right of each icon, which unmounts the device and (if applicable) ejects the CD / DVD / etc.
        • I thought Windows was purposly designed so that you removed media by "ripping it out". They do this by flushing the data to the device as often as possible, ignoring errors, and recovering cleanly if the device was miswritten. Sounds bad, but the chances of failure are miniscule (much more likely to mess up the connector plugging it in), so IMH this is *right* and one of the areas where Windows is well ahead of either Linux or OS/X. Micorsoft does "get it" sometimes...
        • One thing to remember is that the floppy drives in Macs have always been motorized. Yes, you can do the paper-clip trick, but the normal procedure was to tell the OS to eject the drive. Thus, Apple made assumptions about how and when the disk would be removed that are different from Microsoft's -- where PCs had drives with manually removed floppies.
          I think that this is why (as another poster mentioned) Microsoft implemented a scheme to enable floppies to be 'ripped-out' and Apple did not.
          Also, since folks
      • The "trash to eject" feature (or misfeature, if you insist) was not in the original Lisa or Mac. It was added later. So the original design did not mangle the metaphor.

        The main problem is that the only quick operation was apple-E to eject the disk, which did not forget about the contents. This caused it to (due to various other bugs and misfeatures) to randomly ask for you to re-insert some disk you ejected long ago. The official method of "eject and forget" was difficult (I can't even remember what it was)
    • Although I agree about the menus and trash, overlapping windows was well established in existing X servers at that time. X's main difference from the W system used by Andrew was that the windows were not tiled but instead overlapping.

      The Xerox machine, as well as Lisp machines (which nobody here seems to be mentioning) used tiled windows. The most obvious difference with even the first versions of X is overlapping windows.
    • Of the three items you listed, only one is actually an Apple innovation... and that one is an innovation we'd be better off without: pull-down menus.

      Pull-down menus were a hack to let them have a single-button mouse. Everyone else used contextual menus, and even Apple has in a backhanded way adopted them... and before you go all Fitt's Law on me, don't forget that there are *5* "best targets" on the screen for Fitt's Law, and "right under the mouse" is one of them.

      Overlapping windows were NOT an Apple innov

  • Lisa Cut Apple's Throat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bullfish ( 858648 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @12:10PM (#13208340)
    While the machine and software were excellent for the time, it was Apple's boneheaded discontinuation and non-support of the Lisa that made Microsoft the company it is today and sent Apple into the corporate wasteland. I know more than one company that were sold on Lisa, bought is and deployed it. Then, they were told it was the end of the line - zip for you, nada. Had the knuckleheads at Apple even bothered to offer a discount on Macs to corporate Lisa buyers things might have been different. Instead, they got nothing so they shunned Apple. The instead bought MS and when Windows came out they never looked back. Thier employees cut their teeth on Windows machines, and then bought them for home where their kids got ahold of them. The rest is history. Yes, Apple sold a lot to schools, but home is where the fun is and most use came. It's been a Wintel world ever since. Since then, Apple has only gained among niche users in desktop publishing and more recently on media development. I don't count iPod as computer hardware. It is a straight consumer product. Had Apple behaved differently, the PC world could have been very different.

    • Re:Lisa Cut Apple's Throat (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @01:49PM (#13208928) Journal
      I *love* using apple computers, but I have to add to Mr Bullfish's point with a story about a friend of mine.

      Back around 1990 or so he bought a Mac IIfx. That thing was trippy scary fast for the time, and it cost him a HUGE pile of cash - something like $12,000. Which is a huge amount of money for a computer by todays standards and just short of extortionate back in 1990. However it had that weird 64 pin memory, so upping the RAM cost a freakin' fortune, and it was never used again, which meant that this machine was a $13,000 DOORSTOP. That pissed him off. But he was a Believer, and he went back to the Kool-Aid trough again in summer of 1995 and bought a Quadra 950 for about $8,000. It was discontinued a few months later, and at the time with no realistic upgrade path, except to spend another $8000 on a 9500.

      At that point he said "FUCK APPLE" - he had invested over $20,000 on TWO computers, both of which were doorstops. He was able to strip the 950 for some parts, at least. Since then, he's been a Wintel Guy ever since.

      Apple has a habit of doing that - building extremely expensive machines that have no useful upgrade path. Now that computers are so friggin cheap, upgrape path doesn't mean that much, but back in 1990 it really did.

      I bought an LC (or was it an LC-II? I don't remember...) back in 1991 because it was a colour macintosh for less than $2000, which I thought was FANTASTIC. I think it had 8 megs of RAM. But, with no upgrade path, it was useless after a few years, and then I bought my Quadra 650 for about $1700. The Quadra was great - it worked like a champ for years and I finally sold it to someone who is still using it for word processing running Word 5, FreeHand 5, and Quark 3 to this very day.

      Apple's crude discontinuation of Lisa was just the first in a series of major customer mis-steps by Apple. (full disclosure: both of my Apple computers died in April, so now I'm running a cheapy Wintel box, but only until the MacIntel boxen arrive. Then I'll get a MacIntel powerbook. YAY!!! I look forward to getting back to OSX. Windows makes my day long and grim, and the software I use precludes Linux, for now.)

      RS

      • But he was a Believer, and he went back to the Kool-Aid trough again in summer of 1995 and bought a Quadra 950 for about $8,000. It was discontinued a few months later

        The Quadra 950 came out in 1992 [lowendmac.com] - considering the PowerMac 8100 [lowendmac.com] was already available in 1994, one would say the writing's on the wall when it comes to 68k-based Macs.

        Your friend's whining is like someone who buys a dual-CPU PowerMac G5 2.7GHz now, only to whine when the Intel-based Macs come out. You know what's coming, it might still be wo

        • He didn't whine about anything. He just said "Fuck Apple - I've had enough", and just stopped investing in Apple Hardware. I remember when he bought the 950. I don't remember the exact reason why, but IIRC, it had to do something with how many slots it had in back.

          Your second paragraph describes *exactly* why I didn't replace my dead apples with PPC machines. I can't afford to dump serious money into a PPC. I tend to keep my computers for a long time, and while Apple and Apple fanboys are all saying "PPC

  • Raskin had worked with user interface design as a professor for a decade before he started work with Apple. Xerox and Raskin pretty much drew from the same sources while both of them obviously had ideas on their own (Raskin didn't like the mouse, for instance, prefering his own LEAP model). The main idea behind the trip to Xerox was not to be inspired by Xerox, but for Jobs to see in practice what Raskin had been talking about. Read more here: Holes in the histories [raskincenter.org]

  • Lisa's floppy drives (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @01:37PM (#13208845)
    They were weird, nonstandard higher-capacity 5.25" drives. I believe that they were able to write to both sides of the floppy at the same time, doubling the capacity.

  • Fond Lisa Memories (Score:3, Interesting)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @01:56PM (#13208962) Journal

    My mother worked in a government office from the mid 70s well through to the 80s when she retired. The office was in a nearby industrial park to which we could walk from our house. Occasional visits to this typical boring office were livened up by the fact that it had computers in it. Usually they were several-years-behind things, such as mainframes with line printer interfaces and those old reel-to-reel tape drives. However, the office actually purchased a number of Lisa machines, possibly as many as 10. Ultimately they proved to be nothing more than red-ink generators as technology moved quickly and passed them by, but I have fond memories of popping by to see my Mom and the Lisas. I came by that office occasionally and watched the PC grow up; her office mates watched me grow up. It never seems like a special thing until you look back on it.

  • Xerox is a story in itself... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @03:06PM (#13209387)
    Chester Carlson invented electrophotography and helped found Xerox. He grew up dirt poor due to his parents being ill and unable to work. I think he worked three or more jobs while getting his college degree. When he invented xerography for more than a decade, no company was interested into producing it. Later on Xerox was founded as a partnership between him and Haloid. He became very wealthy after that but none the less gave back more than a $100 million to charitable causes.
  • One of the more telling paragraphs says:

    Bill Atkinson left the two PARC visits with a mistaken understanding of the capabilities of the Smalltalk software. While Tesler was giving a demo, Atkinson thought that he had seen two windows layered on top of each other, though they were just bordering each other. This set off a multi month obsession to find out how Xerox had implemented the feature, only to be interrupted by an auto accident. Atkinson implemented the feature, and later found out that the PARC

  • It's not even worth commenting on all the biased and misleading statements in that article. But the Lisa was certainly not the first commercial computer with a GUI. And Smalltalk had overlapping windows.

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